People in rural and regional areas are being put at risk by poor mobile and emergency communications, residents, emergency volunteers and experts say.

We would hate to get it to the stage of somebody actually dying.

St Albans resident Jane Blacker.

Residents of St Albans and the surrounding Macdonald Valley in the Hawkesbury region around 67km from Sydney are lobbying Telstra to improve mobile coverage in their area, arguing residents' lives are at risk in emergencies.

The closest mobile base station is 22 kilometres away at Wisemans Ferry and this site also houses the infrastructure for the Government Radio Network (GRN) and the paging system used by emergency services during floods and bushfires.

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Coverage for all of these communications systems is patchy at best.

Pecan farmer Jane Blacker, 68, who is also part of the Macdonald Valley Association and handles call outs for Rural Fire Service (RFS) volunteers in the event of emergencies, said the emergency pagers often simply did not work and communication between fire trucks and back to base was also an issue.

"We would hate to get it to the stage of somebody actually dying because we can't get mobile reception or communications are so poor," Ms Blacker told Fairfax.

Sherri McMahon, deputy captain of the RFS St Albans brigade, said she had been involved in "several incidents" where the RFS had little or no communication.

Last December she arrived first on the scene at an accident about 21km north of St Albans and discovered a vehicle rolled on its roof and leaking fuel on to the road.

She had to drive a further 1.2km north before finding some mobile phone reception to notify fire control of what was happening.

"At a fire in 2012 at Cosy Nook again we had no communication with fire control, no mobile service, both the captain and senior deputy had to leave the scene of the fire to find a location where we could update fire control of what was happening," she said.

"These are regular incidents in our valley ... members left at the scene are down a vehicle and have no communications back to fire control and as such their lives could be placed in jeopardy."

Macdonald Valley residents recently spent days flooded in and McMahon said the lack of mobile phone coverage meant it was difficult to notify local residents before the water rose.

"Unfortunately it seems that those who have access to these early warning systems being implemented are the ones in areas least effected by emergencies," she said.

Telstra said it had conducted a "detailed review" of options for the St Albans area but there were "no current funded plans to increase the depth of coverage" as it was not commercially viable.

Telstra claims its NextG mobile network covers "more than 99 per cent of the population" but Elise Davidson of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) points out that this is not the same as 99 per cent of actual land mass.

Davidson said there were mobile blackspots throughout Australia and ACCAN had received similar complaints from a resident of Yeoval, in between Orange and Dubbo in NSW. She suspects the problem is partly due to the terrain.

"There are many places like this throughout Australia and absolutely lives are put at risk when emergency services can't make contact with each other and can't make contact with residents," she said.

While around one in three people live in regional Australia, the 2011-12 Regional Telecommunications Review found emergency communications deficiencies, which became clear in the aftermath of the Victorian bushfires and Queensland floods, remained unresolved.

The number one concern raised in consultations was the lack of adequate mobile services.

"The committee strongly believes that increased priority should be given to expanding the mobile coverage footprint in parts of regional Australia where it is not commercial to do so," the review recommended.

A spokeswoman for the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman said while Telstra was obligated to provide a reliable landline service (and fix telephone faults quickly), there was no legislative requirement for a similar standard of performance for mobile or internet services.

"As more Australians turn to these alternatives, it may be that mandatory performance standards will be required for mobile and internet services, but this has yet to gain government policy/regulatory support," the TIO spokesman said.

The NSW RFS said its private radio communications infrastructure was currently being upgraded across the state and "upgrades in the Hawkesbury area are currently 25 per cent complete with completion expected within months".

A spokeswoman for NSW Emergency Services Minister Michael Gallacher said work had been underway for some time on a national "public safety mobile broadband capability" for communications between all police and emergency services agencies but the Commonwealth last year only allocated half of the radio frequency spectrum required.

"Jurisdictions consider this reservation is unlikely to cater for the present and future operational needs of public safety agencies."

54 comments

OK I'll bite. What's wrong with VHF ? We had rural emergencies before the invention of the cellphone you know.

Commenter

Nicho

Location

Sydney

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 7:39AM

Ok, I'll answer. There's nothing wrong with UHF, up to a point. That's the problem though, their range. We're farmers, and we use UHF all the time. We have a scattered property, and wouldn't be able to function without it. Or it would be damned inconvenient without them. We have no mobile service. The trouble is, these days, everybody has become used to relying on mobile phones, and you're at a disadvantage if they don't work where you live or conduct your business. It doesn't look as though we'll ever have mobile service here, either, at least not in the foreseeable future, as we don't have a big enough population for Telstra to worry about us.

We've recently had fires around us (Grampians), and UHF radios played their part. They had to, as there was no alternative, but as I said, they are limited in their usefulness.

Commenter

Nini

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 8:52AM

@Nini - I said VHF not UHF .. VHF has longer range. While I agree that life without a cellphone may be inconvenient, the context of the article was that the lack of cellular coverage was putting lives at risk. Frankly that sounds like a beat up to me.

Commenter

Nicho

Location

Sydney

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 12:41PM

It would be interesting to know though what the stats are on lost lives in comparison now that we do have new technology?

Commenter

Are you sure?

Location

St Albans

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 12:44PM

The local community considered a VHF facility but due to the significant costs involved in commercial VHF tranceivers, decided instead to fund a solar powered UHF CB repeater. This gives the Valley residents a degree of backup to the fixed line network (which regularly fails in floods and fires) but doesn't help the many tourists that come to grief driving on the dirt roads in the Valley.

Commenter

Gordon

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 7:28PM

Nicho - yes, rural communities existed well enough before mobile phones, but the rest of the world now expects that we DO have good mobile service and we are being left out, discriminated against, ostracized and isolated because this is not so. Very much the case in areas on and near the Dividing Range just 20kms east of the Hume Freeway near Benalla.Telstra's claim of "more than 99% of the population" having access to their mobile service should be challenged - it is false advertising, and could not possibly be true.

Commenter

Blue Wren

Location

near Benalla

Date and time

March 20, 2013, 10:06AM

Once again we have an article that singles out Telstra for not providing mobile service, without mentioning the other two cellular providers. Telstra is a private company these days. Just in case the author and the good citizens of St Albans NSW have forgotten. There is no more obligation for them to provide cellular service than for Optus or Vodafone. So why not tackle them all equally?

And Blue Wren, Telstra advertises population coverage. That's not the same as landmass coverage. Think about it.

Commenter

Not a Telstra basher

Date and time

March 20, 2013, 1:39PM

As a resident in a rural community not far from St. Albans, I agree very much with the sentiments of this article. I'm also a member of the local RFS brigade, and I think it's important to point out that most of the vehicle accidents we attend involve non-locals - so it's quite often not just the residents of the area that are the person at risk due to lack of mobile reception. That said, not having mobile reception (except on some mountain tops) is definitely an inconvenience for residents and tourists alike.

I noticed the emphasis on Telstra in the article, but note that Optus has recently come to the party by installing a mobile tower in Bucketty. Well done Optus ! I wonder if Telstra and other mobile vendors factor in the large potential tourist use of their towers when they do their cost/benefit analysis, or if they only consider the small residential population. And how, exactly do you do cost/benefit analysis for potentially saving someone's life ?

Commenter

Dave

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 7:57AM

at the bottom of the towers they will need a fast food outlet aswell....and maybe a shopping mall...petrol station..atm......people that live rural ..remember that you live far away from everyone else....telstra cant service the whole of australia....like nicho said you have lived this long with out it

Commenter

skeptic

Location

perth

Date and time

March 19, 2013, 8:51AM

What an attitude! Talk about "I'm all right, Jack!" As I said above, you are disdavantaged if you're trying to conduct a business these days without mobile service, because everybody has it and relies on it. Your grain broker or livestock broker or wool broker has to be able to contact you at any time if he wants to make a sale for you. You try to upgrade the software on your tractor in the paddock with no mobile service. My son had to do just that yesterday, with the tractor pulled up as close to the house as possible, with a long cable going from the tractor to the router inside. If we had mobile service, that wouldn't have been necessary. Yes, we have done without mobiles in the past, but we want to move ahead with technology just like everybody else. We're not a bunch of hicks living out in the sticks. We want what most of the rest of the population takes for granted.And getting back to the purpose of the article, emergencies. We used to live without landline telephones, too, but would you want to go back to the days before telephones if there's a medical emergency? When you had to harness the horse up, put the injured person in the wagon, and travel to the nearest doctor? I'm sure you don't. We've advanced past that. We in rural areas want to be able to keep progressing at the same rate as those in urban areas. As for your other comments on what would follow telecomminication towers (malls, fast food, etc.), that doesn't even deserve a reply.